The village consists of one street running parallel to the outer buildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with rooms for four families -- two in front, looking on to the wall of the farmyard, which is the fashionable side, and two at the back, looking on to nothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes.

Many a burgess supplemented the profits of a trade by tilling acres in the common fields and grazing cattle on the common pastures; pigs and poultry scavenged in the streets; the farmyard was a usual adjunct of the burgage tenement.

Beyond the farmyard was the farmhouse itself, -- a long, low, timbered building with a broad tiled roof supported by huge oaken rafters and crowned with many gables, -- a building proudly declaring itself as of the days of Elizabeth's yeomen, and bearing about it the honourable marks of age and long stress of weather.